Why access to quality early childhood education and care is a key driver of women’s labour market participation

  by Eric Charbonnier, Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

We are in 1961. JF Kennedy is president and has just designated Eleanor Roosevelt as chairwoman of the new US Commission on the Status of Women: "We want to be sure that women are used as effectively as they can to provide a better life for our people, in addition to meeting their primary responsibility, which is in the home." Fifty-seven years ago, women had to make a choice between pursuing a career or having children. Back then, access to early childhood education and care (ECEC) services was reserved for the elite and was not considered a policy priority; maternity leave was rare, while paternity leave was unheard of. This may seem strange now, but just try to think of society in the 1960s. Just think how far we have come since then: In 1961, only 38 % of women were employed in the United States. In 2015, this figure was at 70%.

Don’t be fooled by the upbeat statistics though. Two generations later, inequalities still exist.  Although women are more engaged in the labour market, they are still three times more likely to be employed in part-time positions than men. They are also less likely to be employed in higher-paid occupations, and less likely to progress in their careers. However, mindsets have evolved, and combining a career and a family for women is no longer the heresy it used to be.  As a recent example, the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, announced some months ago both her first pregnancy and her husband’s paternity leave: "I’ll be Prime Minister AND a mum, and Clarke will be “first man of fishing” and stay- at- home dad." The news was generally well--received, a stark contrast to 1961 when low provision of early childhood services and other work-family provision would have made such a decision virtually impossible.

This month’s Education Indicators in Focus brief takes a closer look at how provision of early childhood education and care has affected the participation of women in the labour market over the years. In the last half century, women’s labour force participation has increased dramatically in most countries. The rise in ECEC provision over this period has greatly contributed to this change, particularly for mothers with a child under the age of 3. As shown in the figure above, both components are strongly associated. However, there are substantial cross-country differences. In countries where mothers’ labour market participation rates are the highest, the proportions of very young children enrolled in early childhood services are also the highest (see quadrant on the top-right). By contrast, combining childrearing and employment is most difficult in some eastern  European countries (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, the Slovak Republic), as well as in Mexico (see quadrant on the bottom-left), partly because these services are under-developed in those countries.

The availability of early childhood services plays a key role in the increased labour force participation rates among women. This in turn has public benefits in terms of higher contributions to society and to economic growth.  But having a good access to such services is not sufficient. The number of ECEC hours per week available to young children is paramount to increasing the full-time participation of mothers in the labour market. For that reason, many OECD countries have recently increased the number of free hours of ECEC entitlements, or shifted from half-day to full-day kindergartens. However, here again, wide variations among countries still exist. Countries with both high levels of participation in early childhood education and care and greater intensity of participation (in hours per week), such as Nordic countries, are in general those in which most mothers work full-time.

Women’s participation in work does not only make economic sense for a nation, but the benefits of early childhood services towards better learning for the children themselves are also now widely acknowledged. In this context, it is not surprising that ECEC has experienced a surge of policy attention in the last fifteen years. However, despite many initiatives over this period to increase access, equity and quality of these services across OECD countries, affordability remains a key challenge in most of them. It is true (and a positive step) that governments often provide various schemes to help reduce the cost of early childhood services for poorer families (including cash transfers, rebates and tax reductions), but these efforts are still insufficient. Thus, children under the age of 3 in most countries are more likely to be enrolled in ECEC if they come from relatively advantaged socio-economic backgrounds or if their mother has completed a tertiary education degree.

Society has progressed a lot in fifty-seven years. Who would have thought in 1961 that someday women would no longer have to make a choice between their career and raising a family? Stronger access and provision to early childhood education and care services has greatly contributed to more equity in the workforce, but more is needed to ensure fully equal participation of men and women, whether at work or at home. Hopefully we will not have to wait another half century to see that happen.

Links
Education Indicators in Focus No. 59 - How does access to early childhood education services affect the participation of women in the labour market?
OECD Early Childhood Education and Care
Starting Strong 2017: Key OECD Indicators on Early Childhood Education and Care

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Is physical health linked to better learning?

by Tracey Burns
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Mahatma Gandhi once said: "it is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver". And indeed, our physical well-being is key to how we live our lives. But while we don't always make the link between our minds and our bodies, physical health is important for learning, too. 

Children who exercise regularly, have good nutrition and sleep well are more likely to attend school, and do well at school. And the benefits are not just for children: good physical health is associated with enhanced quality of life, increased productivity in the workplace and increased participation in the community and society. 

However, children and young people across the OECD are not engaging enough in the behaviours they need to be healthy. Between 2000 to 2016, PISA data show that children and young people were less likely to reach the minimum recommended daily physical activity levels (>60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity daily). They were also less likely to get enough quality sleep, and more likely to be overweight and obese and have poor dietary habits (including increasing overconsumption of soft drinks, sweets, salty snacks and fast food). 

These trends are extremely concerning. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours are associated with higher rates of cardiovascular diseases and type II diabetes, and while historically considered to be diseases of adulthood, these are now evident in children as young as two years old. 

Education is uniquely placed to positively influence the health of students. A newly published paper on recent trends has identified two of the most effective types of school-based interventions:

• Building a healthy school environment: this includes educational interventions, health promotion, counselling and management strategies to promote health and physical fitness. These approaches need to include the whole-school community. Interventions associated with the play environment need to evolve and develop with children and young people as they grow. Building a supportive school culture is also key to effective, sustained behaviour change. For this to work, teachers need supportive school leaders and adequate training, time and resources.

• Changing attitudes towards risky behaviour: for example, universal school-based interventions for preventing drug use. Interventions incorporate knowledge-focussed curricula (teaching the risks associated), social competence curricula and social norms, and usually a component of behavioural modelling. A systematic review of the literature showed that overall, interventions combining social competence and influence approaches had sustained positive benefits. Interventions that focused only on transmitting knowledge, on the other hand, had the effect of improving knowledge, but did not affect behaviour.

In addition to school-based interventions, supporting, encouraging, and modelling healthy lifestyle behaviours in the home environment and in the community are also crucial. In fact, even the best school-based interventions benefit from the involvement of other actors, such as health care practitioners and family and community members. 

The report highlighted that interventions that involve the community, target several behaviours, use multiple behaviour change strategies are most effective. Involving stakeholders in the design and implementation and using technology where appropriate can also help change the behaviour of children and adolescents. This is especially important for disadvantaged communities, because not only is there a greater likelihood to engage in risky lifestyle behaviours in these settings, there is also a higher probability for reduced access to services (due to high cost, location, or lack of transportation), including safe facilities for physical activity such as green spaces. 

Educators, parents and communities and policy makers all have an important role to play in supporting the physical health and well-being of children and adolescents. By working together to embed health in education, we can make a big step in supporting the wealth that is physical health and well-being of children and adolescents in OECD countries.

Links
Working paper No. 170 – Physical health and well-being in children and youth: Review of the literature
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

21st Century Children

Trends Shaping Education

PISA 2015 Results (Volume III) – Students Well-being

OECD Obesity Update 2017
The association of context-specific sitting time and physical activity intensity to working memory capacity and academic achievement in young adults
Universal school-based prevention for illicit drug use
Lifestyle Interventions to Reduce Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Among Children

Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

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The importance of learning from data on education, migration and displacement

by Manos Antoninis, Director, Global Education Monitoring Report
Francesca Borgonovi, Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Migration and displacement are complex phenomena which play an important role in – but can also pose challenges to – development. These phenomena also pose particularly important challenges for education and training systems. Firstly, they can rapidly increase the number of people that require education services, thus challenging both richer countries, which until now had been adjusting to shrinking student populations, and poorer countries, where provision is already stretched, especially in remote areas or slums where migrants and refugees often converge.

Secondly, migration and displacement make classrooms more diverse. This means that the range of strategies teachers need to deploy increases in order to cater for a student population with larger differences in background characteristics, such as the language they speak at home.

Thirdly, education is an important means through which migration and displacement can be managed since school often acts as societies’ main instrument for transmitting the social and cultural codes that forge a community spirit.

Information of good quality is crucial to develop the right policy responses, which is why the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 17.18 calls on countries to “increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by … migratory status … and other characteristics relevant in national contexts” by 2020. Yet, collecting statistics on migrants and displaced people to ensure that education and training systems have the capacity to meet their needs is complicated. Population movements take very different forms: international vs. internal; temporary vs. permanent; those moving in successive stages vs. those returning; documented vs. undocumented; voluntary vs. forced, including internally displaced and refugee populations; students vs. workers, and, in the latter case, skilled or unskilled, and so on. Migrants and displaced people themselves may be in different stages in their life cycle or may differ in their circumstances, for example adults vs. children or individuals vs. families.

To address these issues, as part of the Strength Through Diversity project, a two-day forum on data about education, migration and displacement is being held in Paris, organised by the OECD and the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, whose next edition is focusing on migration and displacement. Such issues refer to at least two levels.

At the macro level, demographic data often do not capture the education profiles of migrants and refugees. The ideal data source, which provides information on both stocks and flows of migration by gender, age, and education, does not yet exist. These questions were addressed last month at the International Forum on Migration Statistics, which also looked at one other dimension of  the education-migration nexus: international student mobility.

At the micro level, which is the focus of this two-day event, a range of data sources are important:

• Multi-purpose household surveys that contain information on internal and, in high income countries, international migration via questions concerning the place of previous residence or duration of current residence, such as the World Bank Living Standard Measurement Survey and the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions. Longitudinal surveys provide further insights.
• School surveys of learning achievement which can link detailed student background to educational outcomes. For example, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asks questions on the student’s country of birth, age of arrival in the host country, and language spoken at home. PISA also assess aspects of student well-being, such as integration and sense of belonging in the school community.
• Surveys on values and attitudes that can relate education to perceptions of the host population concerning migrants and refugees. For example, three waves of the International Social Survey Programme, six waves of the World Values Survey and two waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study tackled relevant questions on this topic. These studies can assess how education systems build values, attitudes, norms and beliefs that improve interpersonal trust and increase civic engagement, which are pillars of democracy.
• Teacher surveys, such as the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), and national surveys that ask questions on teacher preparation for diversity and attitudes towards a diverse student population.

Given the challenges of education systems, the complex forms of population movements, the differences in background characteristics of migrants and displaced people, the different outcomes of education, and the different sources of information available, there is a patchwork of issues, and this requires coordination between researchers and practitioners working in multiple different fields.

The idea of collecting data on education by migratory status that is comparable across countries may be an unattainable goal due to the extreme diversity of migrants and displaced populations. However, the need for documenting and understanding differences in participation, attainment, learning and attitudes between migrants/refugees and host populations for policy purposes remains urgent.

In this context, this two-day forum in Paris has the following aims:

• Provide an inventory of existing data sources and ones that are under development
• Showcase good practices in data and measurement that approach effectively particular aspects of the migration-education relationship and improve understanding of social phenomena
• Identify data and measurement aspects of the migration-education relationship that require urgent attention in order for social phenomena to be better understood
• Assess the merits of equity-oriented migration and education indicators, looking at both intra- and inter-generational issues
• Make recommendations on potential questionnaire items for key areas of interventions the migration-education relationship

Links

Strength through Diversity: The Integration of Immigrants and Refugees in School and Training Systems

Strength through Diversity - 3rd Policy Forum, 12-13 February 2018

International Forum on Migration Statistics

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

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What makes for a satisfied science teacher?

by Tarek Mostafa
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Teachers play a vital role in the lives of their students. They impart knowledge, provide pastoral care, act as role models and, above all, create an environment that’s conducive to learning. But teaching is fraught with numerous challenges that could lead to dissatisfaction and ultimately to drop-out from the profession. Science teachers are particularly vulnerable to quitting their jobs given the opportunities that exist outside the teaching profession.

So what makes a science teacher satisfied enough that he or she would want to keep teaching, despite the challenges they might face?

Data from PISA’s 2015 teacher questionnaire provide interesting evidence.

Science teachers who reported that pursuing a career in the teaching profession was their goal after finishing secondary school are far more satisfied with their jobs and with the profession as a whole. These teachers represent about 58% of all teachers on average across all countries. The relationship between these long-held ambitions and teacher satisfaction is strong across most countries and economies, and particularly in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China), Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Peru and the United Arab Emirates.

But a lack of school educational and physical resources, and behavioural problems among students in school could undermine teachers’ satisfaction. For instance, teachers who perceive that the lack of teaching staff hinders instruction tend to be less satisfied with their profession and with their current job. The difference in satisfaction between the teachers who reported that these shortfalls hinder instruction to a great extent and those who reported little or no impact are the largest in Australia, Brazil, Chile, Germany, Macao (China) and the United Arab Emirates. The findings also show that in 10 out of 18 countries and economies, teachers’ satisfaction with their current job is positively associated with the disciplinary climate in science classes, as perceived by students. The associations are particularly strong in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Peru and the United States.

The presence of a collaborative and collegial working environment could boost teacher satisfaction. In fact, teachers who reported frequent collaboration among their colleagues tend to be more satisfied with their job and with the profession as a whole. Collaborative activities are more common in Australia, Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong (China), Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Macao (China), Peru, Portugal and the United Arab Emirates, and less common in Brazil, Chile, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and the United States.

PISA 2015 also shows that science teachers who engaged in more than three types of professional-development activities during the preceding 12 months tend to be more satisfied with the teaching profession and with their current job. On average and across all countries, 52% of teachers undertook more than three different types of professional-development activities during the last 12 months. The proportions are particularly large in Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Guangdong China (82%), Brazil (65%), the Dominican Republic (76%), Peru (65%) and the United Arab Emirates (65%).

Last but not least, some factors usually associated with challenging learning environments, such as the presence of large proportions of immigrant students or of students who do not speak the language of the host country, are not linked to teachers’ dissatisfaction with their job or the profession. This finding is particularly interesting because it shows that teachers do not necessarily mind teaching in schools with more demanding student populations as long as the environment is conducive to learning, the school climate is positive, and adequate resources are available.

To sum up, teacher satisfaction is positively associated with factors known to improve students’ performance, such as collegial and positive school environments. In other words, teachers’ satisfaction is both an aspect and a consequence of the school environment. As such, one has to improve the learning experience for all students in order to boost teachers’ professional satisfaction.

Links 
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
PISA in Focus No. 81 - What do science teachers find most satisfying about their work?
Working Paper No. 168 - Science teachers’ satisfaction: Evidence from the PISA 2015 teacher survey

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDPISA

Image source: @Shutterstock

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How primary and secondary teachers differ and why it matters

by Marie-Helene Doumet, 
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Learning needs vary as we evolve through life. The early years of education set the stage for children’s well-being, cognitive and social-emotional development; young children starting out in the world require stability, reassurance, and encouragement, and need a warm and caring teacher. At primary school, teachers manage the class, teach all subjects, and help children develop not only basic competencies, but also emotional and social awareness. While this setting still requires a broad knowledge of many subjects, dealing directly with students’ social and emotional development also helps teachers bond with their class, which is essential to learning at such a young age. However, as children progress to high school, learning becomes more about the subject: secondary teachers focus on one or several subjects which they teach to a number of different classes. Their performance will be more strongly evaluated by how well their students perform on these subjects, rather than on how their students develop emotionally and socially.

Other differences exist between the two levels of education. While the entire profession is generally plagued with an ageing workforce, secondary schools are particularly affected by the rising average age of teachers. On the other hand, while it is true that men have always been outnumbered by women in teaching, this trend is much more striking at primary than at secondary level. Both trends have worsened in the past ten years and do not show signs of slowing down.

In spite of these differences between teachers at different education levels, teaching policy is all too often determined by a “one size fits all” approach. This month’s Education Indicators in Focus examines exactly in which ways primary and lower secondary teachers differ across a range of system-level indicators and why it matters, not only for the quality of teaching in the classroom, but also for the attractiveness of teaching as a profession.  

Let’s first start with what it takes to become a teacher. While the type of degree needed to teach primary or lower secondary level is the same in most countries, the content of the training programme differs: primary teachers have more pedagogical and practical training than lower secondary teachers, who are considered to be more “subject matter experts”. However, secondary level has its own set of pedagogical challenges, with teachers having to deal with moody teenagers and poor behaviour. Putting teachers in the classroom without the proper pedagogical or practical knowledge is akin to getting doctors to operate without clinical practice. We would be aghast if this were to happen in hospitals, yet we seem to accept it in the classroom. 

Certification is not everything, and teaching quality stems from much more than the way teachers deliver lessons. It is also strongly affected by their working conditions. Both primary and secondary teachers work approximately the same number of statutory hours, but they allocate their time differently. The figure above shows that lower secondary teachers spend on average 10% less time teaching than their primary colleagues, though in countries such as France and Turkey, this can reach 30% less. The time actually spent teaching matters less if teachers are well trained and deliver effective classes; however, with the long hours required, at school and at home, teachers are finding less and less time to invest in their own continuous development and other activities that would benefit learning. 

Finally, the perception of a fair salary can be pivotal in attracting and retaining teachers. While primary and lower secondary teacher salaries are comparable, secondary teachers hold an edge in more than half of OECD countries. In contrast to many other professions, those with a higher degree are not necessarily paid more: teachers in Finland hold a master’s degree, but earn less in relative terms than Korean teachers with a bachelor’s degree. A fairer compensation compared to other tertiary-educated workers would help attract a more gender balanced workforce and attract new talent that would renew the profession with innovative ideas.

Policy decisions to improve the attractiveness and effectiveness of the teaching profession will always involve a trade-off between these different factors.  Although many efforts have traditionally focused on reducing the size of classes, usually a popular measure for the broad public, nothing works more to enhance the quality of learning than the teachers themselves. However, striving for higher quality is not likely to be the result of one policy change or reform, but requires an understanding of all the factors that affect the profession holistically, from teacher training to long-term support, to actual teaching conditions, including working hours and pay. Recognizing the specific working conditions of primary and secondary teachers would lead to a more targeted policy response. Teachers at each level face different challenges.  Let’s not assume they have the same solution.  

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 58 - How do primary and secondary teachers compare?
Education at a Glance 2017: OECD Indicators

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDEAG

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Shaping, not predicting, the future of students

by Anthony Mann
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo is reputed to have once said that there’s no point making predictions because nothing is set in stone. It is hard to predict the future, but in education policy at least it is not altogether impossible.

We know, for example, from data accumulated over many years that people who exhibited certain attributes when young are more likely (sometimes very much more likely) to do better in work as adults. They are much more likely to find work after leaving school or university and to earn more than people who are otherwise just like them.

Studies have shown, for example, that youngsters can expect to do better in work as adults if they read well at 10 or gain higher levels of qualifications.  We know as well, not least from recent OECD studies, that the children of wealthier parents routinely do better than their classmates from poorer backgrounds, even if they show the same academic promise as children.

It’s unsurprising to learn that academic ability and social background have a big influence on how well young adults can expect to do once they leave education and get into work. This is unsurprising and, for school teachers, more than a little depressing as social background is pretty much fixed, and improved academic ability is a process that is slow and always comparative. Depressing too because the predictive qualities of doing better in school are irrelevant to huge numbers of lower achievers from more modest backgrounds.

But what if there were other, more practical indicators available? Indicators that are relevant to all young people?  Indicators that could provide teaching staff with useful information about which children needed more attention to help them prepare for their transitions into work?

These are questions addressed in a recently published report, “Indicators of Successful Transitions: Teenage attitudes and experiences of the world of work”,  from the research team at the Education and Employers charity based in London. (Full disclosure: I led the team before joining the OECD). Drawing on UK longitudinal datasets and statistical analyses that allow a like-with-like comparison of teenagers moving into adulthood, the study was designed to provide teaching staff with a practical tool for assessing how well their students were being prepared for their ultimate transitions into work.

Trawling through research literature which uses UK datasets which follow thousands of young people from childhood into adulthood, like the British Cohort Survey and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, alongside new analysis of the same datasets, the research team found a number of significant associations between the attitudes and experiences of teenagers related to the working world – and what happened to those teenagers when they became young working adults. For example, studies link better adult outcomes to both teenage career aspirations that are more confident, realistic and ambitious, and the extent to which young people are involved in real workplaces, whether through their schools or in part-time work.  Other research highlights the ultimate value of teenagers’ social networks in helping them find employment or access information about jobs and careers.

In all, 15 such indicators were identified and grouped together into four themes within a questionnaire for young people: thinking about the future; talking about the future; experiencing the future; and thinking about school. The questionnaire was tested with careers guidance professionals in six English secondary schools with some 800 students aged 14 to 16. In this pilot, schools explored the effectiveness of the indicators as a tool for identifying students (at all levels of achievement) who require greater attention and determining the quality of activities undertaken by students.

In addition, the guidance professionals were asked for feedback on the details of the questionnaire and how the questionnaire could be most practically used in schools. They responded that they found the indicators to be effective in identifying students requiring more support. What this means in practice is that both high and low achievers can have poorly informed careers aspirations. Both groups of students might have given insufficient thought to the breadth of their career options and how their current education or training could best relate to their future selves. Practitioners with a good understanding of the needs of students reported that the questionnaire provided reliable results. The indicators were felt to work especially well for 16-year-olds who are approaching a key transition point in the English education system. Based on this feedback, the questionnaire and marking schedule were revised and confirmed.

We may not be able to tell the future with certainty, but we can draw on reliable evidence to make better judgements about the conditions under which young people can expect a brighter future.  The Education and Employers study harnesses great evidence to provide a new tool for schools determined to prepare their students well for working life.

Links
Educational Opportunity for All – Overcoming Inequality throughout the Life Course
Indicators of successful transitions: Teenage attitudes and experiences related to the world of work

OECD work on skills: www.oecd.org/skills

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

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Succeeding with resilience – Lessons for schools

by Johanna Boersch-Supan
Director, Vodafone Germany Foundation – think tank 

Digitisation is expected to profoundly change the way we learn and work – at a faster pace than previous major drivers of transformation. Many children entering school today are likely to end up working in jobs that do not yet exist. Preparing students for these unchartered territories means that we not only have to make sure that they have the right technical capabilities but that we have to strengthen their emotional and social skills. Resilience, the individual capacity to overcome adverse circumstances and use them as sources for personal development, lies at the core of being able to successfully adapt to change and thus actively engage with our digital world.

A special PISA analysis conducted by the OECD in collaboration with the Vodafone Germany Foundation shows that several countries were able to increase the share of academically resilient students with disadvantaged backgrounds over the last decade.* The increase was particularly pronounced –among other countries and economies– in Germany: while in 2006 only a quarter of disadvantaged students performed well in all three academic subjects tested in PISA, by 2015 a third did.

While resilience is foremost an individual characteristic, the in-depth analysis of PISA data from 2012 and 2015 suggests that the school environment can play a key role in mitigating the risk of low achievement among disadvantaged students. To this end, the study was able to identify attributes common to schools in which disadvantaged students succeed. Across the vast majority of education systems examined, the likelihood that disadvantaged students are resilient is higher in schools where students reported a good disciplinary climate, compared to schools with more disruptive environments. This holds even after accounting for differences in students’ and schools’ socio-economic profiles and individual characteristics associated with resilience. Attending orderly classes, in which students can focus and teachers provide well-paced instruction, is beneficial for all students, but in particular for the most vulnerable. 

By contrast, the likelihood of resilience among disadvantaged students is only weakly related to the amount of human and material resources available in their schools, measured through indicators of class size and student-computer ratios. Especially in Germany, however, disadvantaged students are more likely to be resilient in schools that offer a high number of extracurricular activities. The fact that no correlation exists between most resource indicators and the share of resilient students among socio-economically disadvantaged students does not mean that investments in education do not matter. Rather it suggests that resources help disadvantaged students to succeed only if they effectively improve aspects of their learning environment that are more directly linked to their opportunities to learn. Thus, the fact that extracurricular activities are associated with a greater likelihood of resilience may reflect the way in which these investments promote engagement among teachers, students and the students’ families, and can help develop a sense of belonging at school.

The PISA data also offer insight into some specific school policies and managerial practices which can help improve the disciplinary climate at the school level. First, students tend to report a better disciplinary climate in schools with a lower turnover among teachers. Unstable teaching teams may lack cohesion and limit the accumulation of experience that is necessary to establish an environment conducive to learning even in difficult conditions. Teacher turnover can be reduced by rewarding collaboration between teachers and by developing mentorship programmes to ensure that more experienced teachers can support new ones and help them quickly establish strong bonds with the school. A transformational leadership style adopted by principals is a second factor associated with a positive disciplinary climate experienced by students. Transformational leaders foster capacity development and work to promote a high level of commitment among teachers towards a common mission, strategic goals and high academic standards.

The 2017 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook shows rising levels of socio-economic inequality driven, among other factors, by automation in the labour market. Understanding how to support resilience in students is essential not only for equipping them to thrive in a digital future but also for creating more equal opportunities in education and thereby strengthening social cohesion.

*A German version of the study focusing on data from Germany can be found at: resilienz.vodafone-stiftung.de

Links

Vodafone Germany Foundation, Coding & Character – a representative study on skills for the digital future

OECD Education Working Paper No. 167 – Academic resilience: What schools and countries do to help disadvantaged students succeed in PISA

OECD Employment Outlook 2017 (also available in German)

PISA in Focus No. 80 – In which countries and schools do disadvantaged students succeed?

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDPISA

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Learning for careers: The career pathways movement in the United States

by Nancy Hoffman, Senior Advisor, Jobs for the Future
Bob Schwartz, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Over the last generation, it has become clear that something has gone awry in how the United States prepares its young people for life. In spite of millions of young people pursuing university education, fewer than one in three young Americans successfully attain a bachelor’s degree, while millions of good middle-skills jobs go begging because of our failure to build programs to equip young people with the skills and credentials to fill them. In a climate of “university for all” only 20% of young Americans enrol in career and technical education programs, the US version of Vocational Education and Training. This struck us as both a problem and an opportunity crying out for a public policy response.

So when the opportunity arose to come to the OECD for three months in 2010 to participate in the last phase of the landmark Learning for Jobs study, we took leave from our respective jobs (Nancy, at Jobs for the Future, a national NGO; Bob, at Harvard Graduate School of Education) and headed to Paris. We had already had the privilege of working as experts on country reviews for OECD, and knew this would give us the opportunity to go deeper into how school-based VET operated around the world and in particular in northern European countries like Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Learning for Jobs highlighted the essential characteristics of school-based VET. Little did we know, however, that our decision to get involved would lead two years later to the creation of a national network of U.S. states and regions committed to reshaping vocational education and training in the US. We have chronicled the first five years of the Pathways to Prosperity Network in our book, Learning for Careers, published in October 2017 by the Harvard Education Press.

Back at Harvard, in 2011 Bob fed the big lessons from Learning for Jobs into a new report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. The Pathways report generated such strong interest among states that we invited a handful of states to come together in a mostly self-funded network based at JFF to act on the findings and recommendations in the report. Fast forward to 2017. The JFF Pathways team of 12 now works with 14 states and about 60 economic regions within those states to build pathways systems. A major initiative funded by JP Morgan Chase and led by the organization of chief school officers (state ministers) entitled, “New Skills for Youth,” is also strengthening states’ capacity to build career pathways, and myriad promising regional initiatives are underway to infuse greater career information and experience into the high school experience. Examples of Delaware and Tennessee’s pathways development and progress to date can be found here and here as well as in our book.

Most of the new initiatives, while inspired especially by the German and Swiss dual systems, do not now resemble these – and most likely never will. Nonetheless, some lessons from the best systems do influence the strategies states are implementing. Learning for Careers identifies three characteristics of strong European VET that can be translated into the US educational, economic, and cultural context:

• youth in VET take on adult responsibility in workplaces and demonstrate both maturity and technical skill - active learning outside of classrooms meets the developmental needs of adolescents to take “safe” risks, to be challenged, and to test out behaviour in an intergenerational setting; 

• employers act willingly in their self-interest and as partners to the state in building a pipeline of young professionals - employers willingly mentor young people as a social responsibility and as a contribution to social cohesion; and, 

• VET has a secret glue in the employer associations and chambers that aggregate employer need and train for a sector, not for a specific company - such sector organizations can play this role because of a common qualifications system which specifies competencies, behaviours, and knowledge required. (Non-governmental groups in the U.S. are haltingly attempting to build a qualifications system.)

If a European VET aficionado were to visit Delaware, Minnesota, Ohio, or Tennessee, she would see high schools and their tertiary partners building pathways in such fields as tech, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare and NGOs urging employers to open their doors to 16 and 17-year-old apprentices and interns. And perhaps most important, she would hear a difficult conversation about inequality and economic mobility. Our argument is that if through our Network we can enable many more low-income youth to enter the labor market equipped with the technical expertise, professional behaviors, and social networks now enjoyed primarily by children of privilege, we can put them on a path to economic mobility – a benefit for them, their families, and society at large.

Links
OECD Policy Reviews of Vocational Education and Training (VET) - Learning for Jobs
Learning for Careers - The Pathways to Prosperity Network

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How to prepare students for the complexity of a global society

by Anthony Jackson, Director, Center for Global Education at Asia Society
Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

In all countries, rapidly changing global economic, digital, cultural, and environmental forces are shaping young people’s lives and their futures. From Boston to Bangkok to Buenos Aires, we live today in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

The world’s growing complexity and diversity present both opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, globalization can bring important new perspectives, innovation, and improved living standards. But on the other, it can also contribute to economic inequality, social division, and conflict.

How well education systems prepare all of their students to thrive amid today’s rapidly changing world will determine the future prosperity and security of their nations – and of the world as a whole. Global competence education is what will empower students to do just that. Globally competent students can draw on and combine the disciplinary knowledge and modes of thinking acquired in schools to ask questions, analyse data and arguments, explain phenomena, and develop a position concerning a local, global or cultural issue. They can retain their cultural identity but are simultaneously aware of the cultural values and beliefs of people around them, they examine the origins and implications of others’ and their own assumptions. And they can create opportunities to take informed, reflective action and have their voices heard.

On top of the complexity of our increasingly interconnected world, and the call of employers for better intercultural skills, we’ve watched in recent years as waves of nationalism, racism, and anti-globalism have swept across countries around the world. It makes global competence education that much more critical. To put it simply, the number-one solution to combating nationalist fervor is increasing global understanding.

Both the United Nations and OECD have prioritized global citizenship and global competence education in recent years, with good reason. Globally competent individuals are aware, curious, and interested in learning about the world and how it works, beyond their immediate environment. They recognize the perspectives and worldviews of others and are able to interact and communicate with people across cultures and regions in appropriate ways. And most critically, globally competent individuals don’t just understand the world (which is no small thing in and of itself)—they are an active part of it. They can and do take action to solve problems big and small to improve our collective well-being.

At the end of the day, it is globally competent individuals who will be able to solve the world’s seemingly intractable problems. And it’s up to our world’s educators to prepare those individuals for their global futures.

Schools can make an important difference. They are the first place where children encounter the diversity of society. They can provide students with opportunities to learn about global developments that affect the world and their own lives. They can teach students to develop a fact-based and critical worldview and equip students with an appreciation of other cultures and an awareness of their own cultural identities. They can engage students in experiences that facilitate international and intercultural relations. And they can promote the value of diversity, which in turn encourages sensitivity, respect and appreciation.

But how to do that? In a new publication by the Center for Global Education at Asia Society and OECD, Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world, we set forward the PISA framework for global competence developed by OECD, which aligns closely with the definition developed by the Center for Global Education. Based on Asia Society’s extensive experience supporting educators in integrating global competence into their teaching, the publication also provides practical guidance and examples of how educators can embed global competence into their existing curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

As the publication demonstrates through its myriad examples, teachers from around the world have already recognized the importance of teaching for global competence. In one example from a political science teacher in India, students visited a nearby refugee camp to learn about the complexity of the global refugee crisis; in another, a social studies teacher in Mexico guided her students to make recommendations for reducing corruption that they then presented to local officials.

But it also shows that for all students to develop global competence – regardless of their wealth, ethnicity, gender, or background – we need to create access to high-quality professional learning for every teacher in the world. Teachers prepared to develop students’ global competence is a requirement for a sustainable, livable future.

Professional learning for teachers is key, and that requires leveraging digital technology to rapidly build capacity at scale. The challenge now is providing access to these types of professional development resources for all teachers, to transform their teaching methods, their classrooms, their schools – and, eventually, each and every one of their students.

Links
Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world
Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world - The OECD PISA global competence framework
PISA 2018 Global Competence

Photo credit: Asia Society 

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Drawing the future: What children want to be when they grow up

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

The next generation of children will need to create jobs, not just seek jobs. They will draw on their curiosity, imagination, entrepreneurship and resilience, the joy of failing forward. Their schools will help them discover their passions and aspirations, develop their potential, and find their place in society.

But that is easier said than done, and good reading, math and science skills are just part of the answer. To develop their dreams and invest the effort it takes to realise them, children need, first of all, to be aware of the world and the opportunities it offers them.

We often take that awareness for granted, perhaps because schools tend to be designed and run by people who succeeded in them. But this report paints a different picture. Statistics showed previously that more than one in five teenagers are looking to secure the 2.4% of new and replacement jobs in the UK economy that are predicted to be found in culture, media and sports occupations. More generally, over one-third of 15-16 year-olds career interests lie in just 10 occupations. And 7 out of the ‘bottom 10’ young peoples’ occupation choices are actually well-paid jobs. The Drawing the Future survey shows that primary children’s aspiration is also concentrated around similar occupations.

It all starts early. When children between the age of 7 and 11 were asked to draw their future, the most popular job for UK children was a sportsman/woman, with 21% leading by a margin of over 10 percentage points over the next popular occupation; and the sportsman/woman was 10 times more highly rated than a nurse or health visitor (2%). Will these children invest the necessary effort to study tough subjects such as math and science when they don’t see them related to their own aspirations?

Perhaps the most worrying finding of the Drawing the Future survey is the myopic view that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have about the possibility set of their futures. Their sense of awareness remains often limited to the jobs of their parents, and that holds across all countries taking part in this study, except Uganda and Zambia, where teachers were the biggest influencers.

Giving children a better sense of the world of work is not just a matter of social justice. It is also a matter of bringing the potential of the next generation fully to bear. At a time when our economies count on everyone’s contribution, we cannot afford that disadvantaged youths rule themselves out of careers that they could successfully pursue. Having children know someone who did the job they aspire to turns out to be key, and schools can play such a powerful role in helping children meet more people from more occupations.

The drawings also show clear gender patterns. Boys have a preference for working with things, girls tend to prioritise working with people. Over 4 times the number of boys wanted to become engineers compared to girls, and nearly double the number of boys drew scientists as their future jobs compared to girls in the sample. To be fair, the UK has done a lot to level the playing field. For example, 15-year-old boys and girls in the UK achieved the same science results in the global PISA test. But also in this age group far more boys than girls said they wanted to become science and engineering professionals. So more science lessons may be missing the point. The question is rather how to make science learning more relevant to children and youths, including through broadening their views of the world by given them greater exposure to a wider range of occupations. Career counselling in secondary schooling comes far too late. It is clear from the drawings that children arrive in school with strong assumptions based on their own day to day experiences, which are shaped by ideas surrounding gender, ethnicity and social class. Those who still have doubts should watch the 2 minute Redraw the Balance film featuring 66 pictures of a firefighter, surgeon and a fighter pilot, of which 61 were drawn of men and just 5 with women.

So the future will need more primary schools with teachers who help children see their future and the value of learning beyond knowledge acquisition, who are designers of imaginative problem-based environments, who scaffold problem inquiry and nurture critical evaluation, and who bring in parents and volunteers from the world of work into instruction to show children the richness of life and work. Clearly, schools cannot do this alone, but they can play a key part, and the bottom line is that we owe all youths the education that wise parents want for their own children.

The Drawing the Future report will be formally launched at #Davos on the 25th January #WEF18

Links
Drawing the Future survey
Video: The impact of volunteers on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, interview with Andreas Schleicher, Director of OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
OECD Skills Beyond School

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDPISA  and #DrawingtheFuture

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What does teaching look like? A new video study

by Anna Pons
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Looking – literally – at how teachers around the world teach can be a game changer to improve education. The evidence is clear that teachers are what makes the greatest difference to learning, outside students’ own backgrounds. It is widely recognised that the quality of an education system is only as good as the quality of its teachers. Yet we know relatively little about what makes a good and effective teacher.

Our new research project, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) Video Study, aims to help us learn more about how our teachers teach. The study aims to provide a better understanding of which teaching practices are used, how they are interrelated, and which are most strongly associated with students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

The TALIS Video Study is based on a truly innovative research design. It uses videos to capture what goes on in the classroom, and also surveys teachers and students, measures students’ learning gains, and looks into instructional materials to get as complete a picture of teaching as possible. The study will not produce a comprehensive assessment of “the state of teaching”, a global assessment of teachers or a ranking of the quality of countries’ teachers. Instead, we’ll be gaining valuable insights into the practice of teaching and student learning.

We don't really know how teaching and learning unfold in classrooms across the globe. At the OECD, we have asked teachers and students about what goes on in class; we have measured students’ outcomes and teachers’ knowledge, and collected information about the resources at teachers’ disposal and their autonomy in shaping their lessons. But that doesn’t give us a complete picture of what teaching looks like and how it influences student outcomes. Watching peers in action, though, can help teachers become aware of their own teaching methods, reflect on other approaches, and understand what innovative pedagogies actually mean in practice.

The importance of observing real teaching can only increase as the job becomes ever more challenging. Teachers are being asked to move away from teacher-centred methods and to cater to the different learning needs, styles and pace of their students. They are also expected to meet the demands of rapidly changing environments, from being able to use new technologies to assist them in their lessons, to understanding how to teach students from increasingly diverse backgrounds.

Observing how teachers around the world deal with similar challenges in different ways can offer useful new insights. Differences in teaching practices are greater between countries than within countries, particularly when it comes to student-centred and innovative teaching practices. This is because teaching practices are strongly influenced by national pedagogical traditions and do not travel easily. Opening up peer observations to the entire world can provide fresh ideas about how teachers can improve their own practice, no matter where in the world they teach.

Links
Teaching in Focus No. 20 - What does teaching look like? A new video study
Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

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What the expansion of higher education means for graduates in the labour market

by Markus Schwabe
Statistician, Directorate for Education and Skills

A university degree has always been considered as key to a good job and higher wages. But as the share of tertiary-educated adults across OECD countries has almost doubled over the last two decades, can the labour market absorb this growing supply of skills? At first glance, the answer isn’t encouraging: the number of unemployed tertiary-educated adults has been increasing across OECD countries for many years. However, a closer look reveals that the unemployment rate for these adults is still much lower than for those without a university degree.

The latest Education Indicators in Focus policy brief analyses long-term trends in employment outcomes of adults based on their highest level of educational attainment. The figure above shows that, in all OECD countries, adults with tertiary education still enjoy higher employment rates than those without by 10 percentage points, on average, and this advantage has changed little over the past two decades.

While this might seem reassuring, in some countries the reality is more troubling. In Korea, for example, labour market demand has not kept pace with an ever-increasing supply of tertiary graduates. As a result, the employment advantage of tertiary-educated adults decreased slightly, by 0.6 point, between 1995 and 2006. In 1995, tertiary-educated adults in Korea were 13% more likely to be employed than those with an upper-secondary or post-secondary non-tertiary education; today they are only 6% more likely to have a job. With 70% of young adults in Korea holding a tertiary degree, some might wonder whether tertiary expansion has reached its limit. But with populations of school-aged children shrinking across OECD countries, the worry about too many university graduates competing for too few high-skilled jobs might prove to be misplaced.

The “knowledge economy” has increased the demand for better-educated and well-skilled workers. But in many countries, even as enrolments in higher education have grown, companies still report that they cannot find workers with the skills they are looking for. While technological progress and globalisation continue to challenge education systems, automation and digitalisation will be, in the words of two Harvard economists*, an ongoing “race between education and technology”. Countries should thus worry less about the share of tertiary-educated adults in the labour force and more about the skills that education provides. Ensuring that the skills students graduate with are relevant to the labour market will go a long way towards making the expansion of higher education sustainable – and beneficial for all.

*Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz in their book The Race between Education and Technology (2008), Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap.

Links

Education Indicators in Focus No. 57 - Is labour market demand keeping pace with the rising educational attainment of the population?
Education at a Glance 2017 - OECD Indicators

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Busting the myth about standardised testing

by Tarek Mostafa
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Standardised testing has received a bad rap in recent years. Parents and educators argue that too much testing can make students anxious without improving their learning. In particular, standardised tests that could determine a student’s future – entry into a certain education programme or into university, for example – might trigger anxiety and, if conducted too frequently, might lead to poorer performance, absenteeism and lower self-confidence. But are standardised tests really used all that frequently? And do they exacerbate anxiety and undermine performance?

Evidence from PISA dispels these myths.

On average across OECD countries, about one in four 15-year-old students attends a school where mandatory standardised tests are never used, and three in five attend schools where these tests are used only once or twice a year. In 11 countries, including Belgium, Costa Rica, Germany, Slovenia and Spain, more than one in two students are in schools that never assess students with mandatory standardised tests. In contrast, teacher-developed tests and judgemental ratings are used considerably more frequently. On average across OECD countries, nearly one in three students sits teacher-developed tests every month, and about two in five sit these tests more than once a month. In Belgium, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and Chinese Taipei, more than 50% of students sit teacher-developed tests more than once a month.

Moreover, contrary to commonly held beliefs, the frequency of tests, as reported by school principals, is not related to the level of test anxiety reported by students. In fact, on average across OECD countries, students who attend schools where they have to sit standardised or teacher-developed tests at least once a month reported similar levels of test anxiety as students who attend schools where assessments are conducted less frequently. One possible explanation is that test anxiety is triggered by aspects of the tests other than their frequency. For instance, the nature or difficulty of the task, the surrounding atmosphere, time constraints, characteristics of the examiner, the mode in which the test is conducted, and the physical setting of the test might influence a student’s psychological attitudes towards the test. All of these factors, in turn, interact with the student’s own ability, self-confidence, motivation, study and test-taking skills, and preparation.

The relationship between performance in science and the frequency with which schools or countries assess students is also weak. On average across OECD countries, students who are assessed with mandatory standardised tests at least once a year score slightly lower in science (by six points) than those who are assessed more frequently, while students who are assessed with teacher-developed tests at least once a month score somewhat higher (by five points) than those who are assessed less frequently. But after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, these associations are not significant.

The findings also show that students’ school experience have a stronger relationship with their likelihood of feeling anxious than the frequency with which they are assessed. PISA shows that students reported less anxiety when their teachers provide more support or adapt the lessons to their needs. In contrast, students reported greater anxiety when they feel that their teachers treat them unfairly, such as by grading them harder than other students, or when they have the impression that their teachers think they are less smart than they are.

In a nutshell, when it comes to standardised tests the evidence from PISA is clear: The negative influence these tests have on schoolwork-related anxiety is a myth, and the bad rap they have received in recent years is unwarranted. Standardised and teacher-developed tests play an important role in monitoring student performance and academic progress. They do not exacerbate anxiety, especially when students perceive that their teachers treat them fairly, and help them build their self-confidence.

Links
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
PISA in Focus No. 79 - Is too much testing bad for student performance and well-being?
PISA 2015 Results (Volume II) - Policies and Practices for Successful Schools
PISA 2015 Results (Volume III) - Students' Well-Being

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